Prudentia

Many members of high intelligence societies do not consider themselves truly intellectual. Partly, that's because being an intellectual also requires: knowledge and the ability to express one's thoughts and ideas. On the other hand, there are also many intellectuals who are not known for having a high IQ. Rather than with intelligence, they justify their status with academic credentials and reputation. I am currently working on a new project in my spare time that will hopefully remedy this situation. It will make high-IQ thinkers more visible and allow the audience to sort out intellectuals of actually low intelligence. Stay tuned. Claus D. Volko 

On April 14th, 2026, the new book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler was released. Two days later, it arrived in my mailbox. I immediately started reading it and got hooked. Then I completed each of the three parts of the book in one day. Now it is time for me to write a review. While I've recently written an article about the end of the world coming soon, Diamandis and Kotler provide the reader with an optimistic outlook on the future. Backed by a lot of diagrams in the appendices, they show that poverty has dramatically decreased all over the planet, access to modern technologies just as the smartphone has become nearly universal, an increasing share of the world population is living in democracies, and so on. The authors draw analogies to the Holy Scripture and Carl Jung's archetypes, maybe to target the religious American readership. They postulate that humans have gained godlike powers and write that, as Spider Man said, "with great power comes great responsibility...

  U nemployment as the Hardest Job HBI — Myers — 2026‑04‑ 14 — 42% Definition of the HBI As AI systems take over more forms of productive labor, the category “unemployment” stops meaning lack of work and starts meaning the work of having no work . The paradox is that the less society needs human labor, the more psychologically, socially, and economically demanding it becomes to be a human without a defined role. In other words: unemployment becomes a job , and a very difficult one. The Half‑Baked Thought Historically, unemployment was framed as a temporary deviation from the norm of employment. But in a world where AI handles most economically valuable tasks, employment becomes the deviation. The default state becomes “not needed for production.” This flips the burden: Instead of “Why aren’t you working?” the question becomes “How are you managing the work of not working?” The Hidden Labor of Future Unemployment Being unemployed in an AI‑saturated world may require...

  1. Letdown Intuitively, we all recognize that to ascribe to a closed metaphysical system is to accept that some agent—some thinker, some architect—has claimed the authority to describe the entire universe in principle. Every such system carries this hidden assertion: that the conceptual resources chosen by its author are not only adequate for the world, but adequate for all possible worlds, all possible questions, all possible futures of inquiry. This is the point at which my disappointment begins. Metaphysics, at its best, is the attempt to understand what there is and how it hangs together. It is a human activity born of curiosity, wonder, and the desire for orientation. But again and again, metaphysics has drifted toward totality: toward the dream of a final account, a complete structure, a theory that leaves nothing outside its frame. The ambition is understandable; the confidence is not. This endnote is at last motivated by the tension between those two impulses—the legit...

In August 2000, I reviewed two books on genetics and biotechnology: The Biotech Century by Jeremy Rifkin and Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley . At the time, the Human Genome Project was nearing completion, CRISPR did not yet exist, and “biotech” still felt like a futuristic industry rather than a daily reality. A quarter century later, we can now evaluate these works not as speculation—but as forecasts. The result is fascinating: both authors were right in surprisingly deep ways, yet both also missed critical dynamics that define biotechnology today. 1. The Rise of Biotechnology: Rifkin Was Early—but Not Entirely Right Rifkin predicted that biotechnology would become the dominant economic force of the 21st century. Verdict: Partially correct. Biotech is undeniably central today: mRNA vaccines (e.g. COVID-19 response) Gene editing using CRISPR-Cas9 Synthetic biology startups Personalized medicine However, biotech did not replace the...

British science journalist Matt Ridley has written an unusual popular-scientific book: In 23 chapters, the autobiography of the human species is told - each of these chapters correspond with one of a human cell's 23 chromosome pairs. From each chromosome Ridley has picked one or a group of genes, which gave him the topics for the individual chapters.    Contents Overview Ridley starts with the origin of life and human genealogy, then ventures into the history of genetics as a branch of science. Many of the following chapters then deal with particular features caused by genes. Even though Ridley keeps repeating the phrase "Genes are not there to cause diseases", sometimes even in capital letters, diseases are also one of the topics of many chapters; he tells us about research on genetic causes of Alzheimer and Huntington's diseases, asthma and cholera, and so on. A chapter is also dedicated to eugenics, another on cure of illnesses by somatic and ger...